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BLIND TEST INVITE: Do digital audio players sound different?

Greetings Squeezebox Audiophiles ;-). Apologies for not being around as much these days...

Here's a question for the audiophiles... Do CD/digital players converting 16/44.1 sound the same/different? The real question I suspect may be "how different"!

When I came across a post on the Steve Hoffman Forum initially last year and the ~90%:1% result, it got me thinking about doing a blind test to see if I can gather some real-world data using my hi-res ADC.

4 "blinded" devices to listen to from different classes, 4 sample excerpts to try. Which device(s) sound best? Is there a big difference? Lemme know! It might affirm your opinion, or maybe you'll be surprised by your results...

Test closes on April 30, 2019. Plenty of time to listen and let me know. As usual, once the test closes, I'll let you guys know which devices were used in the recordings and how people voted. Feel free to spread this around.

Had a read of them and no surprises - most people finding it difficult to tell any significant difference.

What I found most interesting was the demographic split. The younger participants found the track with less dynamic range to be the most revealing, while the older ones picked the tracks with more dynamic range. The youngsters also seemed to slightly prefer the iPhone whereas the oldies liked the Oppo and Sony players. To me this seems to indicate that what you grow up with is a greater factor in perceived quality than the intrinsic character of the sound. Nurture more significant than nature, as it were.

Had a read of them and no surprises - most people finding it difficult to tell any significant difference.

What I found most interesting was the demographic split. The younger participants found the track with less dynamic range to be the most revealing, while the older ones picked the tracks with more dynamic range. The youngsters also seemed to slightly prefer the iPhone whereas the oldies liked the Oppo and Sony players. To me this seems to indicate that what you grow up with is a greater factor in perceived quality than the intrinsic character of the sound. Nurture more significant than nature, as it were.

Hi Clive,
Yup. I found this interesting and wasn't quite expecting these findings either until I noticed for some reason, the iPhone preference came primarily from the <40 year olds for some reason.

The more I've looked and considered the hi-fi hobby, the more the importance of what happens behind the scenes during production becomes. Loud, dynamically compressed, distorted sounds have become the norm of what younger generations listen to. While there has always been some "studio magic" in all our albums, and nobody really thinks studio are supposed to sound "live", the loss of a more dynamic, "natural" sound probably does over time "program" our brains to think and feel different...

You never know about humans , maybe the pendulum eventually swings back and at some point people might long for a change to something not so loud and synthetic.